“Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in Scotland, some 4,000 more people were accused of witchcraft,” said Mitchell, a lawyer who founded the crusader witches of Scotland.
In total, more than 2,500 people were executed for witchcraft in Scotland, four-fifths of whom were women. They were usually strangled and then burned, after making confessions extracted under torture.
“People took turns questioning them, keeping them awake for days on end and asking them questions about witchcraft,” Mitchell told AFP at a cemetery in the city of Dundee.
The victims were forced to confess that “they were dancing with the devil, having sex with the devil,” he added.
“And those confessions have been used through the Scottish courts . . . to prosecute those for witchcraft. “
They are in the sixteenth century cemetery blown by the winds through a small column nicknamed the “stone of the witches”.
Passers-by leave flower petals and coins in homage to those executed, adding Grissel Jaffray, strangled and burned in 1669.
On a street in the city centre, a mosaic depicting a cone of flames commemorates Jaffray, known as “the last witch of Dundee”.
Mitchell Witches of Scotland on March 8, 2020, International Women’s Day, after uncovering the heartbreaking consequences of the Witchcraft Act.
This law of 1563 passed the death penalty for witchcraft and remained in force until 1736.
Witch hunts were enthusiastically promoted by King James VI of Scotland, who was also King James I of England in 1603.
His obsession uncovered a voice in William Shakespeare’s “Scottish Play”, 3 witches leading Macbeth to his doom.
Mitchell’s arrangement calls for 3 things: a pardon for all those convicted of witchcraft, an official apology from the authorities, and a national memorial to the victims.
Co-champion Zoe Venditozzi, 46, said she knew “nothing” about the witch hunt until she recently grew up in Fife, a hotbed of executions.
He found that “anyone can simply be charged” and that they were “generally ordinary people, poor people” who simply don’t protect themselves or who were considered strangers in some way.
“At the time, other people in the Array were firmly believing in Satan,” he said, and thought women were “vessels” that Satan could simply manipulate.
Natalie Don, MP for the Scottish National Party, the pro-independence party that holds strength in Edinburgh, intends to present an invoice in the Scottish Parliament to download a pardon for all those convicted.
“In several countries around the world, other people continue to be accused and punished for practicing witchcraft,” he told AFP.
“Scotland leads the way in recognising the horrors of our afterlife and making sure those other people don’t go down in history as criminals. “
Scotland is prone to witch-hunts, according to Julian Goodare, professor emeritus of history at the University of Edinburgh, who oversaw the creation of a database to record them.
With another 2,500 people executed out of a population of two million, the rate is five times higher than the European average, he said at Edinburgh Castle, the site of many public executions.
It was driven in part through Scotland’s distance from the Catholic Church by the Protestant Reformation, which saw an endemic “fear of ungodliness,” and accelerated after an alleged plot to bewitch King James in the 1590s.
It also favors a monument to this history: “There is nothing we can do to replace the past, yet we can be informed of it. “